Original subtitles

- My husband was reading the paper.

He said, "There's been a killing."

I said, "Has there?"

he said, "Yeah."

He said, "I hope they catch the bugger that did it."

On the 9th of February 1963,

after an argument, my girlfriend started walking home.

I tried looking for her

but suddenly she was gone.

I was concerned because there was a killer

out there, shooting people.

This is where I found her

bleeding to death.

- It was a downright bloody lie.

Button was a voice around town in the criminal element.

That bloke is bloody guilty.

# So you run, run, run

# From everything you are

# And you're lost

# With every scar

# And you say my name like it's a game

# But you can't hide

# I see you there

# Behind the lies

# You never know the pain

# It comes and goes

# In ways that cannot be erased

# It only fades away

# Long enough to remember

# The price we paid #

Pass you that one.

Remand for youth,

John Button.

It was a hit and run.

Rosemary was his fiancee.

Terrible.

John Button was responsible.

He was seen to be the guilty one.

Knowing you've got John Button,

you know, we can relax.

- When this charge came out,

the group with whom I associated said they didn't believe it.

No one is that hot-headed.

- The hit and run of Rosemary Anderson was awful.

But Button is an awful piece of work.

Had a shocking temper.

- John was head over heels in love.

He did not do it.

- No, I reckon he's still guilty.

A lot of people think he's still guilty.

Lots.

- I've heard people say that he had a temper.

Oh...

No. Not with me.

Over here at the back, I've got the hit run.

In the front row is Button.

I became involved in John Button's case

about thirty years after he was arrested.

Madril confession...

He certainly didn't look like somebody

who would be capable of a crime like this,

but I covered police courts as a cadet journalist.

Hit runs, hit runs.

And I could see that they could look very nice and sound very nice.

I used my contacts from my days in government

and was able to get access to every case file.

The deeper I dug, the more clear it became

that this was far more complex than anyone had ever realised.

There was still a lot of division in the community

as to whether John was guilty or not,

and none of us had been told the full truth.

Thank you for coming, everyone,

and it's nice to see a few friends there.

For those who don't know me, I grew up in Perth

and on Australia Day, 1963,

there were five shootings in Perth in one night.

(GUNSHOT)

It set Perth into utter panic.

Everyone was terrified.

(GUNSHOT)

And so was I.

He's got a gun!

(GUNSHOT)

- It completely changed the city.

Then, when the entire police force was searching for this killer,

just two weeks later

Rosemary Anderson gets run down by a car as she walks home at night.

And all the evidence points to her 19-year-old boyfriend, John Button.

Police took John to the main police station in Perth

and detectives took a statement.

- I told them as much as I could.

I started off about telling them that we'd had an argument.

She'd walked home,

and I'd followed her down

and found her lying by the side of the road

and rushed her off to the doctor's surgery.

- But the detectives didn't buy it.

They were the best in the business.

They knew a liar when they saw it.

Stuttering. Stumbling.

He had liar written all over his face.

But the police, they don't just go on hunches.

They needed evidence.

- Button's car was in the Roe Street police yard.

I was called to examine the vehicle for its mechanical condition.

You judged the vehicle on its damage,

how it occurred, where it occurs, points of impact,

stresses and so on.

When I investigated the Simca,

I saw that there was damage to the front over-rider

on the bumper.

John's car had been involved in a collision.

- These policemen,

they noticed the front of the car had been damaged

and they noticed a few drops of blood on the bonnet of the car.

Also, I had a large amount of blood on my hands.

I'd actually run into the back of a car

a fortnight earlier,

and damaged the left-hand grille and headlight.

But I didn't know how the blood got there.

But then even more evidence of Button's guilt.

They found some stockings and a girdle in the backseat.

Aha! Sex was involved.

They worked it out.

He'd got a bit fresh with her, maybe a bit of playing around,

but then she said no, and she went off.

He got angry, stormed after her and wild at her, he ran her down.

For police, this was proof that Button was lying.

But they didn't believe my story.

I've never been as upset in all my life

as I was over this.

But I tried not to think about that.

I was more...

I was more concerned about Rosemary.

All I could think of was her being hurt.

I didn't want to believe it.

I just wanted to live in a fantasy world

where it's been a big mistake.

The police were determined to get the truth out of him,

so they kept interrogating him.

- These policemen turned around and said,

"Look at the damage to the front of the car. We know it's you."

"We want a confession."

But then things started getting a lot worse.

- John Button had been caught,

but there was still a shooter out there.

(RADIO TUNING)

- A mystery gunman shot two people dead in Vincent

and Louise Streets, Nedlands.

A third man was critically wounded,

and the gunman fired upon two other people

sitting in a parked car.

The gunman vanished into the night as mysteriously as he had arrived.

He left few clues.

We were certainly reporting every car backfiring.

Every time somebody knocked at the door

you'd call out, "Who is it?"

Doors stayed locked.

Windows stayed locked.

We didn't sleep outside anymore.

We're a big, suspicious, scared city.

- We've got to find this person.

Everybody was looking at each other.

- Everybody knew everybody.

And so everybody suspected everybody.

Life changed completely.

Every police officer was onto it.

- But everything that they had been doing to date

seemed to have been wasted.

- I think we were losing empathy with the police,

because they couldn't solve

what should have been a simple solution.

Probably about 500,000 people lived in Perth at that time

and 500,000 of them were frightened for their lives.

So they wanted the police to fix it,

and they couldn't.

Oh, huge pressure.

- What's happening?

Murders committed and no one's being charged with anything.

And this is true.

To the point where it got to Parliament

that we weren't doing our job.

- Questions were being asked in Parliament

as to why the FBI wasn't called in.

Scotland Yard should have been called in to give the local CIB

the assistance it required, because of ...

there was still no result from our investigations.

- They then brought over a New South Wales Detective

and put him on the team.

And we were very unhappy about that.

- That must have been frustrating for you guys.

Well it was.

Everybody was feeling it.

- And then nothing more happened.

The shooter had gone quiet,

and we'd started to relax slightly.

He hasn't done anything for a while,

so we thought we were OK.

But we weren't.

That was me, hanging out clothes at the university.

On Australia Day 1963,

well I was in Papua New Guinea

for the holidays, with my university friend, Shirley.

While we were driving in the car,

over the radio came the shocking announcement

that people in Perth had been killed.

And one of them was John Sturkey, whom we knew.

That was even more horrifying.

We had no idea six months later

Shirley would be shot as well.

Shirley and I, we became friends in the last year of school

and then went to university together.

She was quite charismatic

and she was quite ambitious.

I think she wanted to try and rise above the more working-class family.

We spent a lot of time together and became really close friends.

After Papua New Guinea,

Shirley and I made our debut at the Graduation Ball.

That was me, doing the curtsey.

You had to curtsey to the Chancellor.

The university was very up-market.

We spent a lot of time going to the coffee shop.

Sometimes going to lectures,

but more often than not, sleeping in and missing lectures and so on.

But by August holidays, the place was fairly deserted

and several of the students would babysit for people

who lived in these posher areas near the university, in Dalkeith.

So this particular night,

Shirley took the place of another student who was sick

to babysit for these people named Dowd.

We were all locking our doors.

One had been left unlocked.

This shooter found it.

(MUSIC PLAYS)

(GUNSHOT)

(RECORD STATIC)

Perth erupts again.

The shooter is still around.

He's still out there,

hunching around houses, looking for unlocked doors.

Shirley McLeod was babysitting for Karl and Wendy Dowd.

So I rang Karl Dowd

and I took shorthand notes of what he told me over the phone.

"I went up the stairs first and saw her."

"Having seen her, I raced into the nursery

"and put my back against the door."

"Immediate assumption was that this guy was still around.

"I just stood there with my back against the wall going,

'No, no, no.'"

It was a Sunday morning

and there was a loud bang on my door,

and it was our University warden.

She said, "Oh Shirley's been shot."

I said, "But she's alright, isn't she?"

She said, "I'm sorry, but I'm afraid she died."

I, I just was sort of completely horrified and shocked.

And detectives, they had taken apart everything in her room.

They had taken all of the books out of the bookshelves.

Pieces of paper out of pockets of her clothing.

That was pretty dreadful.

- Perth girl, 18, shot.

Police hunt for maniac. Ohh.

- And the police believe that the killer could be

the same person who committed the Nedlands and Cottesloe shootings

six months ago.

Oh, no.

Not another one.

Especially near us again, close to home.

- Mm.

- It just seemed endless.

It was a shock that you could be sitting your lounge room.

And the police were absolutely right.

We were dealing with a maniac.

And everybody was totally at the end of their tether

when it comes to this.

- Police officers,

they weren't seemingly making any headway whatsoever

and the nature of the murders were so brazen,

so outrageous and so different.

- And then, suddenly

there was a major breakthrough with Shirley McLeod's murder.

For the first time at a murder scene,

they found a fingerprint.

There'd been no fingerprints on any of the other murder scenes.

They found one that testing, checking, showed

didn't belong to the baby's parents,

didn't belong to any visitors, didn't belong to any tradesmen.

They had a stranger's fingerprint in this house.

They started fingerprinting en masse.

- The police were house to house,

door to door,

on residents in the area,

particularly in the areas

where the multiple murders were committed.

Many, many residents in the Nedlands, Cottesloe area,

Dalkeith area, were fingerprinted.

It was the biggest door to door fingerprinting operation

ever in Australia.

The plan was to fingerprint every male over 12 years old.

It was unprecedented.

- I can still see them the day they came and fingerprinted me.

Dad set this thing up for them,

then we had two policemen come in.

And Mum made them a cup of tea.

It was still like that.

So they had a cup of tea while they fingerprinted us.

I thought it was a bit of an invasion of privacy,

but that had to be set aside in the better good of everybody.

They fingerprinted

every male student in the university,

including her brother,

which is shocking really when you think about it.

She was so close to her brother.

The atmosphere of the western suburbs suddenly changed.

There was some hope

they might catch this guy before the next one.

A glimmer of hope.

We had a little tiff.

She ran out of the house. I went to follow her.

I couldn't find her for ages.

At the police station,

John Button continued to tell them his version of events.

John told them he drove under the subway,

and found Rosemary lying in the sand.

But they had real evidence against him.

The grille was buckled. The headlight rim was dented.

And there was blood on the car.

And then, examining Button's car again,

they found a dent on the bonnet,

a broad, shallow dent about the size of a head.

Clear evidence that Rosemary's head had hit the bonnet

before she was flung off to the side in the sand.

So they kept asking over and over and over.

- Tell us again.

- And this was this sort of questioning

that went on and on and on then.

- Again!

Yeah, what happened?

- "Why did you do it? It must have been you."

"Look at the blood on the car. Just tell us why."

The police,

they said it could have been that you just got too close to her.

You could have just meant to scare her

and made a slip and ran her down.

And I've seen her on the side of the road, in the sand.

I kept telling them the same story.

And I think she was bleeding.

- "I found her lying by the side of the road,

"and I took her off to the doctor's surgery."

And I said no, that I hadn't done it.

- But the detectives,

they weren't buying it.

They thought he was lying.

So they kept on at him.

They were going to get the truth out of him.

And that's exactly what they did.

So this document...

..is a confession that my father signed.

In his words,

"Rosemary was walking on the left-hand side of the road."

"Before I realised what had happened,

"I had hit her with the left-hand side

"of the front of my car."

"I stopped my car and got out."

"I saw Rosemary lying on the left-hand side of the road,

"level with the front door."

"She had a cut over her right eye and was bleeding."

"She was unconscious and not moving."

You know, my questions as I grew up and asked my Dad, "What'd you do?"

"How could that possibly be?"

"How do you end up with a signed confession?"

- And then they started getting physical.

And I remember being punched a few times.

And it was then that I thought,

well, I wanted to know how Rosemary was.

I said to them, I said, "How's Rosemary?"

And they said, "Oh, she's dead."

"She died a couple of hours ago."

At that point, I didn't care what happened to me.

(KEYS CLACKING)

Said, "You had an argument?"

I said, "Yes."

- You got fresh with her.

I said, "Yes."

"You followed her in the car?" "Yes."

- You tried to scare her.

- Yes.

And you're there and ran her down.

I said, "Yes."

At that point, I signed a confession.

- That's a bullshit story.

Anybody likely to believe that?

This is the police he's talking about.

The police.

The people we trust to protect us.

John, he felt guilty.

He had been lying.

Now he was telling the truth.

He'd signed a confession.

They had their man.

- I know my Dad signed that.

But it's jarring to me.

It doesn't fit,

because I grew up knowing that my Dad...

..is the softest, most-gentlest man you could come across.

- He confessed to the murder of Rosemary Anderson.

He had the argument with the girl

and then there was a hit and run.

- If someone was to say, "Oh, Button had a real temper."

I never saw that. Ever.

- I was charged with wilful murder.

I was sent down to Fremantle Prison.

It was my nineteenth birthday.

- For the next week after Shirley McLeod's murder,

the police were still in the middle of a huge fingerprinting operation.

In the end, they collected 8,000 fingerprints,

but they did not get a match.

But then there was another major breakthrough

on the other side of the river.

Right over in Mount Pleasant in the south of Perth.

Hidden away,

under a Geraldton wax bush.

They had found a rifle under this sprig of Geraldton wax.

It's pretty well right here.

Four or five yards from my bedroom window.

The couple were walking by.

The lady decided she wanted to pick a piece of Geraldton wax

which had these nice little flowers on the end.

As she went to pick them,

she's noticed the rifle on the ground.

When I found out that rifle was right outside my bedroom window,

I was petrified.

I've got a shivery feeling just thinking about it.

They called the police.

- We took the rifle in to the ballistics people

and it was then ascertained that this was the rifle used

to shoot the latest victim,

the girl Shirley McLeod.

What we did,

we took another rifle back and wired it into this bush.

- So they put up a lookout for us.

- And then we kept a 24-hour vigil

in a camouflaged tent,

wearing camouflaged clothing,

changing staff at midnight

so that nobody knew of the presence of the detectives in that area.

(THUNDER)

They were there for seventeen days and seventeen nights

in one of the worst winters we ever had.

- But nobody went back to retrieve it.

They waited two weeks, but nothing happened.

So the police came up with a plan to draw out the killer.

- How could we get the perpetrator back to the bush?

So we decided on a ruse whereby it was decided

that insertion in the local Daily News.

- The truth is,

the CIB called in myself, as the Daily News crime reporter,

and told us they'd found the rifle.

So we were more or less given a carte blanche

to write anything we liked,

with the hope of attracting the killer back for the weapon.

And we fed out such stories to the effect

that fingerprinting was being conducted

in the Mount Pleasant area.

Just try and entice whoever it was

to come back for it.

- It must have been a very hard job for the police,

because it was a cold winter.

It was cold and wet and rainy

and still not knowing, will this killer come back for his rifle?

Two weeks later,

half past one in the morning,

just as the streetlights went out,

Bill Hawker, who was on guard,

saw a car pull up opposite the bush.

Because it was so steep,

they could only see the top of the car.

- But they had to wait and see if he'd come to get the gun.

Perth is waiting for this.

The police reputation is hanging on this.

It must have been a very difficult time for those police officers.

If we miss, and he's got a rifle and sees us up here ...

- The lookout,

two 15-stone blokes ran down.

And we got the bastard.

The perpetrator is taken in for questioning.

They've got him.

- They'd got him. - They got him.

- Oh, at last. - Yes.

Got him.

Bastard!

- The police were extraordinary.

When anybody mentions a Geraldton wax bush today,

you think of that rifle.

Finally, the police had the shooter of Shirley McLeod.

He was small and he was mumbling something.

They actually thought they had a wild animal,

because his hands didn't feel human.

But he was wearing kid gloves.

He always did that to avoid fingerprints.

The detectives in the CIB Headquarters in Perth

take a statement.

But this man kept denying anything.

They had him going for the rifle,

but he said he had just been going to urinate there one day previously

and had seen it and was coming back to get it

for the fun of it.

He denied everything.

But then they found a .22 rifle cartridge in his car.

That cartridge was tested and proved to be

a cartridge from the rifle that had been used to kill

Shirley McLeod.

They had their man.

- After they charged me,

because I was charged with wilful murder,

I was put in solitary confinement on death row before my trial.

Death row down at Fremantle Prison

consisted of about seven or eight cells

that were wired off from the rest of the prison.

There'd be a mattress on the floor,

there'd be a plastic bucket in the corner.

I did hear in prison the killer came to retrieve his rifle,

but I didn't believe it.

I thought they'd been out looking for this killer.

They were after a crime to solve.

They just had to find someone to pin this crime on.

- Button was on death row, pleading his innocence.

Wow.

Guilty people in prison are always pleading their innocence.

But Button's parents believed him.

Now, they needed the best lawyer in Perth.

We're looking at a portrait of my father, Ken Hatfield.

My father was a top criminal lawyer and a QC.

He was one of the best.

A man with great morals and great integrity.

The phone would ring at 3am.

He would get up.

A taxi would pick him up at 4am

and he would go straight to the office

so that he could work

without telephones and people interrupting him,

before he had to go to court.

If you had him for a lawyer,

you would be a very lucky man.

The Button family contacted my father.

So he went to visit Button in prison.

My father said, "You tell me the truth and I can help you."

- He said, "John, why did you sign that confession?"

And he said, "John, did you do it?"

And I said, "No, but it was my fault."

- My father didn't really know, you know, what he believed.

I think you always think you can trust the police, don't you?

My father thought that John would lose

because he signed a confession.

But my father loved a challenge.

- Ken Hatfield had a real record for getting his clients acquitted.

Button's family,

they mortgaged their house to pay for him,

but that gave them some hope.

At the trial,

the biggest thing that his defence had to deal with,

of course, was the confession.

That was going to be the problem,

because people didn't believe that the police would do anything wrong.

(GAVEL KNOCKING)

So Ken Hatfield tried desperately to have John's confession

excluded from the trial.

He ran a voir dire, a whole day of argument before the judge,

with the jury absent,

to explain they'd hounded him, they'd gone on and on,

and that confession wasn't given voluntarily.

It certainly didn't mention any violence,

but it was the detectives going on and on and on at John.

Not letting him off.

"Come on, come on, tell us the truth."

"You did it, didn't you? You killed her, didn't you?"

And he was trying to get the judge to believe

that it wasn't given voluntarily,

therefore it should be excluded from the trial.

Despite him presenting this,

the judge said he was convinced

that there was no impropriety on behalf of the police

in getting this confession from Button.

- My lawyer said, "The confession,

"That's the best evidence they've got against you."

He said, "I won't ask you the question in court,

"have the police beaten you up or not, but if it does come up,

"think very carefully about what answer you give."

They don't believe the police were beating me up,

"They mightn't believe you on anything, and they could hang you."

Consequently in court, the question did come up.

The prosecutor asked me if I'd ...

..that there'd been physical abuse.

Now I didn't want to call the police liars

by saying they had been beating me up.

And after thinking for a few seconds,

I had to say no.

- And then in the trial, the prosecutor asked Button,

"How did that dent in the bonnet get there?"

You can just see it there,

or a ripple, buckled slightly.

- I told them I didn't know

what had happened to the bonnet of the car.

- And he just said, "I wouldn't like to say."

And that was it.

You know, that was it.

"I wouldn't like to say."

Now that doesn't go down well, does it?

"I wouldn't like to say," to me,

means you're guilty.

It got there and I'm not going to tell you.

(GAVEL KNOCK)

- After that, my father thought he was going to lose the case.

He was very concerned.

- The trial lasted all week into Saturday,

and at the end, the jury deliberated for three-and-a-half hours.

I didn't know what to think,

whether I'd be found guilty or not guilty.

To get convicted, I could be hanged.

- For the jury, it ultimately came down to,

"Do you believe the police,

"or do you believe a stuttering teenager?"

They came to a decision.

- I was up in the dock.

I was trying very hard to hold myself together,

when the jury came back with the verdict.

(GAVEL KNOCKS)

(TAPE RECORDING PLAYS)

- Would you ask the witness to come into the box, Mr Hatfield?

- Members of the jury,

have you agreed to come to a verdict?

- We have, Your Honour.

- How say you?

John Button, guilty or not guilty?

Not guilty, Your Honour.

Bart Kakulis, who was sitting with my father said,

"Thank Christ."

"Not guilty, Your Honour."

My emotions shot right up.

I, I just felt this great big load

had suddenly been lifted off

and I was free.

I felt a bit like a bird.

I was able just to fly out of there.

I was free. It was all over.

I just couldn't believe it.

I looked out the back of me, to the door, and thought,

"Could they stop me if I hopped out of the dock and just ran outside?"

- I'm sorry, sir, I said the wrong thing there.

- But then suddenly, the foreman turned around and said,

"Sorry, Your Honour, I made a mistake there."

- I must apologise, Your Honour.

Read that again to me, please.

- How say you, John Button, guilty or not guilty?

- Guilty, Your Honour.

(TAPE STOPS)

Mm.

I looked at my lawyer and he's just sat there

and I couldn't believe it.

My mind was just screaming out,

"Don't sit there. Do something."

"Say something."

"Surely this can't be allowed to happen."

But he did nothing.

- And the Justice had to say, "Guilty to what?"

because it could have been wilful murder, murder or manslaughter.

"Manslaughter, Your Honour."

Manslaughter.

It was terrible.

It was devastating for all of them.

What a lot of crap, you know.

And a mob of bastards, you know.

And saying it's a lot of bullshit.

Sunday Times, the next day, in the morning,

'Jury Returns Manslaughter Verdict In Car Case'

and they run a photo there

of John's father thanking his lawyers.

And he must have been heartbroken.

- I went out to get the paper.

I threw the paper onto my father's bed

and said, "Well that's one case you didn't win."

And he said, "It's one bastard I should have."

"That boy is innocent."

I think everyone was quite happy.

He was found guilty.

- The relief was amazing.

- Knowing they've got their man,

John Button.

Intense relief.

- We were watching it, and my husband says,

"This boy says he's not guilty."

And I said, "Well, do you reckon he is guilty, Eric?"

"What do you think?"

And he said,

"Well if he's not guilty, he's no need to worry,

"'cause they're bound to catch the killer sooner or later."

"He'll confess and they'll release him."

- I was sentenced to ten years hard labour.

Hey Dad, so this is your old workshop.

- We all had a toolbox like that.

We used to make cupboards for the government.

- I didn't know that.

The worst part of prison is the nights.

During the day, you can keep yourself busy.

But at night,

the lights are turned out at 8pm

and you've got nothing left to do.

- This is my Dad's prison cell.

F52, Fremantle Prison.

This is where he spent...

..his sentence.

I never realised what it might be like for him

to be on this side of it,

with no capacity or freedom to let himself out.

I just wanted to live in a fantasy world

where it's been a big mistake.

You get more and more emotional until finally hours later,

you'd throw yourself on the bed, crying your eyes out.

This was basically every night.

It would ... would get to you.

One of the memories I know so well as a child

is my father's pacing.

Even when he's...

..distressed, or stressed

or distracted as an adult,

he paces.

And he paces exactly four paces

the size of his cell,

and he still does that now.

And I grew up watching my Dad

with his fists clenched by his side, pacing.

I realised the demons that keep him awake at night.

- I never got over it.

- You know, why does he still feel

he can't get over it?

Why is he tormented?

Because he's guilty.

I've never thought he was innocent, ever.

- The police had the shooter of Shirley McLeod.

It was a man the police knew as a petty thief.

A small man with a disability, cleft palate, cleft lip.

A family man, seven children, from South Perth.

Eric Edgar Cooke.

My husband.

Oh, dear.

It was Father's Day.

The kids were all babies.

They all ran to the door with presents for Dad

because they thought it was Dad coming home.

He'd been out all night, which wasn't...

unusual.

But there's Mr Nielsen.

I said, "Oh, hello."

"What have you got him for this time?'

because he was always getting arrested.

"Loitering or stealing?" He said,

"Far worse than that, Mrs Cooke."

- Bill Neilsen came in with Mrs Cooke

and she called out, "What are they doing to you?"

And he said, "Oh, they're saying they're trying to tell you

"that I'm the bloke they're looking for."

I didn't believe it was him.

I said, "You might have got him for loitering,

"but you're telling me you got him for murder?"

And they said, "Yes, and he's confessed to it."

And I said, "Oh, you're telling lies."

"You're just trying to make a big fella of yourself."

But I said, "Cookie, you tell your wife the truth."

Well I said, "It's not true, is it, Eric?"

And she said, "Eric, what is the truth?"

"What, what have you been doing?"

I said to Eric, "I don't believe the police."

He said, "They don't lie."

He said, "The police never lie, Sally."

He said, 'It's true.'

And he said, "Oh yes, darling, I'm the man they're looking for."

Well I knew he was a thief

and a womaniser,

but that's far different to being a murderer.

And he said,

"It's a good job you caught me

"without me knowing I was being caught,

"'cause I had enough bullets and a rifle up in my ceiling

"to do away with my family and then myself."

And that's what he had in mind.

And the police said, "You'd kill your little children?"

"Well I wasn't going to leave them behind for anybody else."

And they got the gun out of the ceiling.

He wasn't telling lies.

- And then what'd you do?

Well I had seven kids.

No money. Just a pension.

Rented house.

So...

I had sisters, wouldn't come near me because of the scandal

and my sister said, "Well, you move away from here."

"Go to another state. Change your name."

She said, "Well you won't be seeing me with my daughter."

"This name's not going to rub off on here."

And I...

well I didn't know what to do.

- The police had John Button for the murder of Rosemary Anderson.

They had Eric Edgar Cooke for the murder of Shirley McLeod.

But although we in the community were relieved,

we weren't really relaxed.

Police suspected Cooke

might also be responsible for the Australia Day murders.

(GUNSHOT)

There were similarities between all the shootings.

The same type of rifle was used

and all the victims had been shot in the head.

So they took Cooke to the locations of all the Australia Day shootings,

to see if he might confess.

He took them around.

He went from house to house to house

but he only told them about minor crimes.

He would take them to a house

and say where he'd stolen money from,

what sort of dogs they had, the decor of the house.

Even what whisky decanters he'd taken a swig from.

But he couldn't or wouldn't talk to them.

Nope.

You can't do much about it.

- Then, there was another completely unexpected turn.

Cooke confessed to running down Rosemary Anderson.

- I got the news in prison.

I was sitting there, stuck to the wireless.

(RADIO TUNING)

NEWSMAN: The cruel killer,

he confessed to being a hit and run maniac

in a stolen car.

- Eric Edgar Cooke

confessed to running down Rosemary.

I couldn't believe it.

He did the right thing and came out with the truth.

I thought straight away,

"I'm out of here, if somebody's come and confessed."

I was just basically waiting for someone to come and release me.

But they didn't.

Life just got worse instead of better.

(MUSIC)

- He was driving around, looking for someone to kill that night.

I got to about here when I heard the car rev up.

I kept screaming that he was coming for me.

- Until he is hung, the book can't be closed.

- This is the time to clear my Dad's name.

- Belief is not proof.

They were going to show

whether John was a liar and a killer,

or whether he was totally innocent.

Prisons are full of people who never did it.

I opened the door and down on the grass was a body.

I just thought, "She's dead."

And now we've got a strangler.